Surfaces of various living articles can be easily stained harmfully by fouling, for example, soils, deposition, dirt and so on. To remove fouling, various detergents have been developed and examined to enhance their detergency. By these efforts, many means have been proposed in order to remove hard fouling.
While detergents excellent in removability of fouling have been developed, there are a large number of developed techniques such as techniques of preventing fouling and techniques of facilitating removal of fouling by treatment (hereinafter referred to as antifouling techniques), and techniques applied as detergents have been found. For example, JP-A 2001-181353, JP-A 2001-271094 and JP-A 2001-181601 disclose an antifouling detergent using amphoteric polymers compound having a molecular weight of 1000 to 1,000,000 prepared from an anionic vinyl monomer and dialkylaminoalkyl (meth) acrylate or dialkylaminoalkyl (meth) acrylamide. JP-A 9-169995 discloses a toilet bowl antifouling detergent lowering a surface tension inside a toilet bowl and exhibiting an antifouling effect by using, as antifouling base materials, an anionic surfactant with a cationic polymer compound or a cationic surfactant such as dimethyldiallylammonium chloride homopolymer having a molecular weight of 100,000 to 1,000,000, dimethyldiallylammonium chloride/acrylamide copolymer having a molecular weight of 1,000,000 to 10,000,000 or dimethyldiallylammonium chloride/acrylic acid copolymer having a molecular weight of 1,700,000. Further, JP-A 7-102299 discloses a foaming type of toilet bowl detergent comprising dimethyldiallylammonium chloride/acrylamide copolymer having a molecular weight of 500,000, together with a mineral acid, a monoalkylquaternaryammonium salt and a nonionic surfactant.
Further, EP-A 342997 discloses a multipurpose detergent composition comprising a nonionic surfactant, a bactericidal cationic surfactant and a non-anionic polymer capable of adsorption onto hard surfaces and as such non-anionic polymers poly(dimethyldiallylammonium chloride) (trade name: Merquat 100 (ex Merck)) and other polymers are disclosed. EP-A 467472 discloses a liquid detergent composition using an antifouling polymer for hard surfaces and a cationic quaternary polymethacrylate, for example a polymer having a beta-(trialkylammonium) alkyl methacrylate unit with a molecular weight of 5,000 to 50,000, is mentioned.
WO-A 2002/16536, published on Feb. 28, 2002, discloses an antifouling detergent for hard surfaces, which comprises a polymer having a weight-average molecular weight of 1,000 to 6,000,000, in the molecule thereof, the monomer unit having at least one substituent group selected from amino groups and quaternary ammonium groups.
In the techniques disclosed in these publications, polymer compounds having cationic groups are adsorbed onto hard surfaces to exhibit their antifouling effect, and they exhibit an excellent antifouling effect at an initial stage. However, it was found that during repeated use for a long term, there occurs the phenomenon of so-called re-deposition wherein hard surfaces are easily fouled adversely, and there is demand for solving this problem.